General Evans--(After a pause) "Yes, but your second duty is to your
country."
It was just poor business arguing with Sam Janney. In fact he got so
tired of arguments every time he wished to cross the Potomac he obtained
a pass from the Federal President, which I have seen,--an ordinary page
from a school boy's lined tablet on which was written, "Allow the
bearer, Samuel M. Janney, to cross the Potomac at any time."--A.
Lincoln. That pass was just about as all inclusive as one can be made.
Samuel Janney claims that Loudoun County did not have near the troubles
of neighbor against neighbor as did East Tennessee, and it can, he says,
be credited largely to the influence of Friends. In fact, it was not
uncommon when the Confederates occupied the section for the Secessionist
neighbors to help out their Union friends and vice versa when the Union
occupied the county.
The War cost the Friends of Waterford at least $23,000.00, while those
at Goose Creek lost over $80,000.00, including both property damage and
livestock loss. In 1872 all loyal Loudoun citizens received $61,821.13
for livestock losses, nothing for property lost by burning. Friends from
Philadelphia largely built back the mill of Asa M. Janney where Coit
McLean now lives, known as Forest Mills. If it had not been for the
generosity of Friends in the North there would have been real suffering
among Friends in Loudoun after the end of hostilities.
As early as 1792 a committee on "Spiritous Liquors" was appointed at
Fairfax and it must have done a good job, for by 1809 no member was
reported to deal in them. In the year 1819 Goose Creek had a committee
report that several members had even stopped the giving of liquor to
harvest hands and found it to be such a good idea that a minute was
written admonishing against its use thereafter at harvest. It was not by
accident that Loudoun County was for years the center of the Womans
Christian Temperance Union in the state of Virginia. When the Lincoln
Lyceum Association Hall was built in 1874 a Men's Temperance Society,
the Good Templars, flourished there for some time. The first performance
in the new hall was "Ten Nights in a Barroom."
Nearly every deed to a meeting house calls for a school house, for the
instruction of the young. At Fairfax a school fund was raised in 1779,
but it was not until 1802 that a plan for "pious and guarded education
for children of Members of the Society" was instituted. The school,
built for $400.00, remained open until 1871, when the public school
system took over.
At Goose Creek, on the first of 6th month 1815, a committee of William
Smith, Mahlon Taylor, Jonas Janney, Stephen Wilson and Samuel Nichols,
Sr., were appointed to consider the building of a school on the Meeting
lot. The committee reported in favor of the building on the 27th of 6th
month, and in 8th month reported to build the school for the sum of
about $400.00 or thereabouts; already subscribed was $346.00.
In 8th month, 1816, the following committee was appointed to have care
and oversight of the school held in the recently erected schoolhouse:
Israel Janney, Amos Gibson, Mahlon Taylor, Isaac Nichols, Bernard Taylor
and William Kenworthy. Jonathan Taylor was the first teacher employed.
As committees were released, new ones were appointed whose duties were
care and oversight, the hiring of the teachers and visiting the school.
On such an occasion, a student of the school has told us, they looked
forward to the visit of the dear old Friends, kindly offering to assist
with a hard lesson or difficult problem. (How they have changed since
his day.) When the lessons were all through the copy books were placed
before them for inspection and marked 1, 2, and so on, down to the one
containing "pot hooks and hangers" as the curves were then called.
This school continued right on through the summer without any
intermission except for two weeks for wheat harvest. No holidays were
observed. One teacher taught ten years with only one day off and that
the day of his wedding. A roll of the students of the Oak Dale School
shows one-third of them to be either Taylors, Nichols, Janneys, Hirsts,
or Browns, with one-half the teachers of like surnames. For many years
the bequest of Isaac Nichols, deceased, was used to defray the expenses
of poor children going to this school.
Early Friends had schools in other places: one a spring house on the
Isaac Wilson farm, where several families pitched in together to keep
school. There was a log school at Ivandale, one called Summer Hill in
front of the present driveway to Thomas Taylor's home, where P. G. Clark
now lives, built of logs hauled by Josh Hatcher, who has been called
Loudoun County's first bank. Another was Flint Hill Academy at
Hugesville, run by Friends.
At Springdale, in Lincoln, Samuel M. Janney had a boarding school for
girls, charging $32.50 per quarter in 1839-40, with extras, pen, ink,
pencils and lights 50 cents additional per quarter. Drawing and French
were three dollars extras. Day students paid twenty dollars the quarter.
Supplies were taken in lieu of cash. Henry S. Taylor paid his tuitions
in 1842-44 with several quarters of beef, barrels of flour, a horse and
sheep (the horse for transportation, not eating). Henry B. Taylor
states--"dried peaches and apples were standbys in the diet of that day
and hominy was the universal substantial breakfast food, one that would
stick to the ribs. Samuel Janney bought hominy at Waterford mills, 5 or
6 bushels at a time. No Shredded Wheat or toasted hay for breakfast food
at Springdale."
Before 1908, Will Smith and Josh Brown and others were canvassing the
county and Philadelphia neighborhood for money to build a high school.
At last $15,000.00 was raised, and in 1908 Lincoln High School opened
its doors. The labors and work of erecting this school, the first high
school in the county, was borne mostly by Friends. When the building
burned in 1926, there was agitation to take the insurance money to
another town to rebuild; a lengthy hearing was held at the Goose Creek
Meeting House, but people had reckoned without the canniness of the
original builders as the deed stated that the money was to be used to
build a school within one quarter of a mile of the meeting house and
that was where it was rebuilt. For the year the rebuilding was going on
the students were taught in the meeting house, the present store
building, and the old Phin Janney store building in Lincoln.
Friends engaged in businesses of all kinds, of course, stores, iron
foundries, such as the William H. Taylor foundry at Lincoln, where the
celebrated Taylor plow, bells, and frog doorstops were made, woolen
mills, flour and grist mills and the like. Though transportation was a
difficult problem Friends were right up front in the first turnpike and
railroad ventures. Many a Quaker trunk contained crumbling shares of the
stocks. Israel Janney was a trustee of the Leesburg-Dranesville turnpike
and Phineas Janney of Alexandria, treasurer of the road from there into
Alexandria. Phineas Janney's reports are on file at Richmond, and are
referred to by one writer as being "full of these and thous and common
sence."
The meetings became a sort of Chautauqua for visiting Friends having a
'concern' and many came to hear these people from far off. John Woolman
visited Fairfax in the early 1740's. The famous Elias Hicks visited in
1798, and several times later; Stephen Grollet in 1801 and Richard Mott
in 1801; John Kersey (the book has it Jersey Kersey), a famous Quaker
preacher and author of the driest book I have ever read; Elizabeth
Robson, Bartholomew Wister and Ruth Ely, 1826. Elizabeth Robson was an
English Friend with very Orthodox views as was Thomas Shillitoe, another
English Friend who came to Loudoun on a preaching mission in 11th month
1827. Also gracing the fronting benches of the Loudoun Meetings were
Elisha Bates, John Comly, Edward Hicks, whose primitive paintings are so
much in demand, and the famous Benjaman Hallowell who started Robert E.
Lee in mathematics.
Stephen Grellet, Elizabeth Robson, and Thomas Shillitoe were the
so-called Orthodox Friends whose ministry throughout the country helped
to cause such sad havoc in Friends meetings and brought about the
separation of 1827-28. Loudoun Friends at this time were little affected
by the ideas advanced by these people, based mostly on theology and
evangelism which at the time was traveling thru many of the churches of
the land. Some eight families took off from Goose Creek Meeting only,
Fairfax being affected not at all. These Orthodox Friends, as they came
to be called as opposed to the so-called Hicksite Friends, built a
meeting house south of the graveyard in Lincoln on the next hill, a
corner now of J. C. Chappell's heirs. Here they had a meeting until the
Civil War, when it was laid down.
Along about the early 1880 this sad chapter in Friends history had to be
reopened when Richard and Mary Snowden Thomas, brother and sister from
Baltimore, raised the clarion call of evangelism. At first, in 1885, the
Orthodox meetings were held in the Lincoln Lyceum Hall until a house
could be built. In all about eight families withdrew from Goose Creek to
form this new Lincoln Monthly Meeting of Friends which occurred in April
of 1887 in their new meeting house. Daniel J. Hoge, Clark and Rebecca I.
Brown were appointed overseers with Joseph Pancoast as treasurer. A
subordinate meeting was organized at Silcott Springs in 1894 but its
life was short, being closed in the winter of 1904-5 and the building
sold in 1933.
As is usual with such religious separations there was too much feeling
on both sides, and I am not going to say there was not. Now we can laugh
at Will Brown's sally to one of the Orthodox driving by the old meeting
to go up the road to the Orthodox meeting on a very blustery, wet day:
Brown, "Well, Hoge, the new road to heaven is a damn wet one, isn't it?"
Or an Orthodox Friends referring to the Hicksites (in the words of a
Hicksite), as "those cigarette smoking, whiskey drinking, Christ
rejecting Hicksite Friends."
Fairfax Meeting House was burnt in 1887, and in spite of the decrease in
numbers it was rebuilt at a cost of $4,840.00. Its young men having gone
away to the west and the opportunities limited to educated persons, as
the Quakers undoubtedly were, the meeting lost members until the sad day
came when it was laid down in 1926. The last paper was signed in 1929
and the final grand meeting held with many a Friend wiping away a
furtive tear.
Goose Creek Friends were not paying their preacher either, for during a
terrible wind and rain storm in 1943 half the roof and the west end of
their meeting house was blown off and in, making the house unusable. The
Orthodox Friends came to the rescue and meetings were held together in
their house until the Goose Creek meeting house could be rebuilt.
Friends found out they could get along together and like it. All the
younger Friends wondered what it had all been about anyway, so after the
grand opening of the newly reconstructed meeting house in 1948, the
Goose Creek United Monthly Meeting of Friends came into being in 1950.
Friends have stepped on many toes with their advanced views, but they
have been right so often as to gain much respect throughout the country.
That their worship is not understood by many is well known and even as
early as 1776 Nichols Cresswell went to meeting in Leesburg and
reported, "Mr. Brooks and I went to the Quaker Meeting, but were too
late, tho it would have been equally as well as if we had been sooner,
for the spirit did not move any of them to speak. Can't conceive what
service the people can receive by grunting and groaning for two or three
hours without speaking a word. This is a stupid religion, indeed."
The Religious Society of Friends is as the name implies a group of
people with the religious conviction that one's life is the experience
of love, love of God and love of one's fellow man. It is a living
fellowship rather than a sacred institution. From this view comes all of
its good. It affirms that it is the Presence in the Midst--that God is
everywhere--that every man is endowed with this light within. Religion
for Friends is not apart from life nor for special days. The early
Friends had no Christmas nor Easter, every day is equal in the sight of
God. It is "the life we lead, the things we do" which count; as witness
their history in Loudoun: that African children should be educated; that
men should be free; a man should not demean himself by taking off his
hat to another; that work is noble; that the laborer is worthy of his
hire; that no man should lose while you gain; that children must be
educated to live a fuller life for mankind; that no one has the right to
take a life that only God can give; that the _fallen_ should do better
and come back into the fold, "which is our desire for her."
Friends hold their meetings for worship unplanned; with no constant
jumping up to do this or sitting down to do that; in a plain room
without distracting influences, trying to find in a silent communion,
enfolded by His presence, the spiritual guidance they seek.
And so I find it well to come
For deeper rest to this still room,
For here the habit of the soul
Feels less the outer world's control;
The strength of mutual purpose pleads
More earnestly our common needs,
And in the silence multiplied
By these still forms on either side,
The world that time and space have known
Falls off and leaves us God alone. _Whittier._
Sources other than acknowledged in the text: Henry B. Taylor, Howell S.
Brown, Mabel N. Lybolt, L. H. Taylor, for minutes, notes, articles,
manuscripts, and consultation; _Landmarks of Old Prince William_;
Briscoe Goodhart, _The Loudoun Rangers_; James Head, _The History of
Loudoun County_; Loudoun Historical Society _Bulletin_, 1958; Samuel M.
Janney, _Memoirs and History of Friends_; Hopewell Friends, _History of
Hopewell Friends Meeting_; Hinshaw, _Quaker Genealogy_; Frederick
Gutheim, _The Potomac_, from "Rivers of America" series.